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Gestalt Blogology

Surfing a sea of music and memory

It's one of those days - the sky pulls
scarves of white and grey across its blue, the last leaves on a tree
in autumn fire flutter like impatient butterflies before a migration,
a trace of salt blows up the hill on a sea wind - and there's house
work to be done.

I grab a pot of coffee and a plate of
sliced fruit, snag my laptop, and swing by the under-stairs to get
the iron on my way to the immense pile of recently washed clothes. I
connect my laptop to the hi-fi, plug in the wireless network card,
type a few search criteria into my MP3 player, stand up the ironing
board and finally hit the shuffle and play buttons. And get to work.

What has all this to do with each
other? Well it's about preparing a space for contemplation, a time of
mining for meaning and memory, and somehow ironing and listening to a
semi-random sample of my music collection can consistently give that
to me more than any other activity.

Why? First because music for me must be
personal, untainted by the canned perceptions of MTV videos, the bare
lines of literal lyrics or the meagre insights of the CD cover notes.
A song is an encapsulated experience that you can re-live and
re-interpret each time. A song is also a permeable moment; it affects
the character of everything else that is simultaneously seen, heard
or touched, while itself being felt and remembered with everything
else that lives in the memory of that moment.

But why ironing? Because it adds a
tactile quality and a minor rhythmic kinaesthetic
dimension that substantiates the acoustic ambience of of music.
Meanwhile my mind can float in a sea of memory, pulled here by a
moment when a song played before, or tethered there by a vision of my
wife wearing the item of clothing that I iron.

I'm reminded of the narrative at the
end of American Beauty where Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) ponders
his own little life; like Lester, I am grateful just for the
privilege of being, and even more grateful that music and the simple
physical act of ironing can give me a perspective of timelessness
that allows me to experience my own existence as a virtual eternity.
My ironing board is my surfboard and I surf on the sea of memory,
pausing to treasure some flotsam or jetsam, or to ride one wild wave
again. Perhaps this is an activity I should save for my latter years,
but I choose to do it now as a I balance on the tidal foam between
blank youth and weathered age, only to ride on again to that endless
golden beach on my horizon. Play on sweet music of memory, until I am
myself only a memory. Now, time for a coffee!